


the burnt child

by mortalitasi



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Angst, F/M, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Tragedy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-07
Updated: 2017-10-07
Packaged: 2019-01-10 03:12:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,976
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12289989
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mortalitasi/pseuds/mortalitasi
Summary: Estinien wakens only briefly between long stretches of healing sleep.He spends most of his time walking in dreams, trying to separate himself from the tendrils of Nidhogg that still cling to him and his mind; and when he opens his eyes, she is waiting for him.





	the burnt child

**Author's Note:**

  * For [goatrocket](https://archiveofourown.org/users/goatrocket/gifts).



> the wonderful Sarnai Zaya (who really doesn't appear as much as she should in this intro flashfic) belongs to my incomparable best friend, who you should totally follow on twitter @goatrocket so you can see her mindblowing ffxiv art, wink wonk

Vengeance is a narrow path.  
  
It makes a small, brittle creature of anyone that walks it. Its poison is almost self-sustaining: even as it washes away who you are, it gives you strength to continue, marching ever onward toward the promise of relief. A man who lives for the sake of revenge is one willingly dead—Ishgard’s army is full of them, these shambling corpses, wielding rage without question, faith without caution. He had been their spearhead, leading if not by word, by example. He will always be ashamed.  
  
The wyrm’s dreams lurk in the dark of his mind long after the separation, muddling the faint lines he’s drawn between himself and the world-destroying fury of Nidhogg. Who was it that died? He cannot remember. There have been so many. The images warp past him in quick succession, like paintings blurring in the wild wind, the colors mingling, the sounds distorting.  
  
A boy lies in the snow. He struggles under the crushing weight of the smoldering ruin pinning him down. The houses on the north side had all disappeared in a swath of fire long as watchtower and twice as wide; years and years later, the sight still haunts his sleep—the bright blast of heat, blackening everything, turning it to ash, killing people before they even had time to draw breath to scream, leaving only carbonous shadows behind as a mark they’d ever lived at all.  
  
He watches it happen again, his heart straining against the confine of his ribs. He stands aside, looking on at the boy, dirty and forgotten and already half-mad with wrath. Behind him he hears the crack of wings on air, like a thunderous storm, and around him the snow flutters and flies away. He knows what’s happening, without having to turn: the houses that had withstood the initial onslaught had been paid terrible, personal attention.  
  
A shade out of a nightmare had descended on the roof, denting the thick wood as though it were nothing more than butter. One of the walls had simply folded to pieces under the wyrm’s weight, unable to bear the great strain. Nidhogg had peeled back the tiling and the stock with a single pull of his claws, scarlet eye rolling in its socket, roving, searching, fixing upon the single thing still breathing.  
  
On nights when the terrors are their worst, he wakes convinced he has returned there, to the place where he was remade, surrounded by the screams carrying into the smoke-choked sky. The chirurgeons had called him lucky for being flung back by the first explosions—lucky. Lucky to be sat under the burning wreck of what used to be a home, suffering betwixt ice and flame. Lucky to be consigned to lying there, helpless, hidden, frantic with fear and such odious bile, forced to do nothing but listen. _Lucky._  
  
He swivels around, making himself face the horror laid out before him: Nidhogg, perched atop the crumbling roof, wreathed in flame, maw smoking and hissing with steam, black as ebony against the clouded gray of the heavens. And the _house_ —cracked open like an egg, dwarfed by the sheer size of the monster astride it.  
  
A blaze the likes of which the Horde can summon does not pass quietly—it roars with a voice of its own, swelling, so overwhelming that it can reduce the scope of any existence to a drone, drowning out anything else.  
  
Nidhogg rears back, breathing deep. Above the buzzing chaos of the inferno, the dragons wheeling in the firmaments, the groan of wood and metal being torn apart, rises a small voice, high and sharp and scared. All alone, in the very end.  
  
“Estinien! Estinien!”  
  
_I will keep you safe. I swear it._  
  
He had learned that day that promises burn as easily as parchment. He would never again pledge himself unless he knew beyond any kind of mortal certainty that he would succeed.  
  
The cries stop when the fire starts. His brother’s voice splinters, breaking off into sizzled gurgling, and he breaks his arm trying to wrest himself free from the cage of rubble. He is watching, as himself, apart from this, but he is at once the boy, as well, as he has been every year since this wretched moment, trapped in a repetition of this curse, over and over. Every waking minute of every day, it has dogged him. He has lived this a thousand times, and will live it a thousand more, but he will give it life no longer. He cannot.  
  
The tears streaking down his cheeks dry in an instant—he is too close to the flame. He exhales, and the warmth spiders in his breast, like swollen branches of molten metal. He cannot be sure—is he the hidden boy, or the shadow visiting havoc upon these enemies most vile, unleashing fire into the puny chamber until the pathetic figure curled in its corner is nothing more than a charred lump of coal? He is pleased—no, he is repulsed. He is brokenhearted. He is triumphant. The warring, shrieking forces in his head cannot decide. He is _angry._ He hates. That, he is sure of. There is a pause, for a moment, as the disparate forces agree on this lonely fact.  
  
The devastated landscape falls away from beneath him, carried away by the tide of memory. The murky haze melts into blinding spring. The air smells of blood and flowers. He looks down—at the betrayers of his sister, crawling over her broken body like little clinging parasites, their greed and gluttony permeating this scene of carnage so thoroughly he can taste it. She is beautiful, even in death, her silvery hide glinting in the morning sun, her eye-sockets gaping and empty and defiled. They are red with what they have pulled from her, covered in her gore, laughing and reveling like the villains they are while she lies there, desecrated.  
  
She had been the best of them all, wise and kind, with the light of opals caught in her wings; they are crumpled by her sides, now, the translucent film between their bony fingers shining still, but flightless forevermore.  
  
He swears it, then and there, as love dies in him—he will kill every last one of them, turn their meagre settlements to embers beneath his feet, crush their people, and make corpses of their children. He will leave none of them alive. This pledge he howls to the sky, cracking stone with his voice, moving mountains, changing everything from what it once was.  
  
There will be war.  
  
The darkness returns, washing away the sunlit mountainside and the knights. He is once more himself, small and not winged, standing in the vast nothingness of this place, feeling so very weary. He no longer finds solace in the gloom, nursing wounds that he has kept open for the sake of his hatred. There is something on the far side of the light for him, waiting anon—he tries to grasp at the memory, but it slips between his fingers, silky as water. It is precious. It is worth living for.  
  
_I must away_ , he hears his own voice telling him. He used to believe that, in letting go, he would only be according every one of the dead dishonor. The litany of a grieving heart.  
  
He will not forget—and all the same, he will not linger.

 

 

…

  
  
  
  
When Estinien wakens, she is still at his side.  
  
She has fallen asleep, leaned up in a high-backed chair, one fist lodged under her chin, her twitching tail draped over her knees. She is dressed in a strange assortment of linens she claims to find comfortable: loose trousers and a wrapping blouse that is cinched tight at her slender waist, arms bare, the low collar doing nothing to conceal the patterns of dusky scales across her skin. He had found them passing odd at first—perhaps even repulsive—placed as they are, at the joints and the cheeks, and even across her forehead and the back of the neck. They are soft, despite their rigid appearance, as he has come to know.  
  
He observes her, for a while; the gentle cadence of her breaths, the clustered brush of her thick lashes, the fall of her straight, fine hair, red as a cherry, darkening again at the roots. He cannot understand why she insists on altering its color. The true blue-black of it is a fine thing, so like the best ebon mail.  
  
He hadn’t spared her much consideration when they had first met. He’d thought her smart-mouthed and foul and rather foreign, and had been quite determined to keep ignoring her as long as she did not involve herself with what he had believed his purpose. She is, however, exceedingly talented at inserting herself into any sort of situation—be it on or off the battlefield. By the time she had become a fixture in his life, it had been too late to extricate her.  
  
A stubborn woman—a good woman.  
  
She opens one cat-yellow eye at the brush of his fingers at her thigh, her focus immediately sharpening.  
  
“Do you need anything?” she asks, voice husky with disuse.  
  
Having her wait on him, he decides, is an altogether disturbing experience. He will be glad to be rid of this sickbed, and this infirmary—the sooner, the better.  
  
“No,” he admits. He feels neither thirst nor hunger.  
  
“Then… what? Did you miss the pleasure of my unparalleled company?”  
  
He scowls at her. It only earns him a sharp-toothed grin. “You cannot stay. You—”  
  
“We’ve been over this,” she says. The interruption does not bother him as keenly as it should. “Eorzea won’t fall apart if I’m away for a couple of days.”  
  
Estinien scoffs. “Past experiences beg to differ.”  
  
She ignores him, plowing on. “I am xaela.” She always says that with a strange mixture of pride and hesitation, her accent thickening the words. “I don’t need ‘ _a proper bed,’”_ she says, dropping her tone to a register he imagines she believes resembles him. “And I don’t want to go. Put that in your Ishgardian pipe and smoke it.”  
  
“In my…?”  
  
“It’s a figure of speech.”  
  
“None like I’ve heard.”  
  
She sticks her tongue out at him. “Well, that’s just your problem, isn’t it?”  
  
He sighs, wincing at the pull of the stitches near his ribs. She notices instantly. “Cease your fussing,” he grumbles.  
  
“A telepath now, are we?” she says, dryer than a riverbed in drought. She stretches, shoulders popping, toes wriggling. “If you want me to cease my fussing, you should hurry up and get better. And stop whinging.”  
  
He casts her an offended glare. “I do not _whinge_.”  
  
“You whinge. Bad as a rusty door.”  
  
Arguing with her is pointless, and so he settles for shutting his eyes.  
  
It is deathly silent in the infirmary at night; she keeps the dimmest of lanterns on a far nightstand in this room, but nothing more. The gold light plays over her delicate features; with her odd pink-grey skin, she is truly a lovely vision amidst the impersonal sparseness of the hall. One could hear a pin drop. It is utterly, perfectly peaceful. And it makes him want to tear his own hair out.  
  
“Estinien?”  
  
“Sarnai,” he mumbles, at a loss for a better response.  
  
He hears her shuffle, leaning over his bedside. She presses a kiss to his mouth, chaste and brief, so unlike her usual affections, and brushes away the errant strands of his hair from his brow. She is warm, always smelling of leather and spices, and the touch of her is a tonic against the harsh realities he has to face each time he makes the sojourn back to the waking world.  
  
“Sleep well,” she whispers, before pulling away.  
  
And in the dark of the healing room, he smiles.


End file.
